Handling PC Death in Simulationist Combat
Adam Riemenschneider:
I'd like to talk about an event which occurred several months ago in a playtest game I ran.
System: The basics
The game is one I've independently published, called Factions (sadly, you probably haven't heard of it yet). All you need to know for this post, however, is that the game is Actor stance, very Simulationist, and combat is not particularly forgiving.
The Game setup
The group was a team of Therans, which are supernatural beings with reality-bending animal aspects. This mini-campaign was the first go-through with Therans, which will be written into the game world in a later supplement. The players know that Therans are pretty tough in general (although not the walking slaughterhouses that, say, WOD werewolves are), but don't really know how much punishment they can take. The PCs were Theran gang members in a war-torn city.
The Players
This was with my usual playtest group, so it's people who have played the game before and know what they're about. Their names, or precisely what they played isn't very important. They were a tough group.
The Situation
The group was making their way across the DMZ part of the city. There's a lot of fighting going on, but they're not a part of it. They've ditched their vehicle and are trying to be sneaky. I had them cross the path of an aggressive sniper team. Player 1 is the first target exposed, and the enemy sniper takes a shot at him, and rolls badly. Not bad enough to miss entirely, but accuracy means a lot in this game, and not much damage is done. A graze.
Player gets across the open street and takes cover. The rest of the group takes up positions of cover against the sniper. They know they have to get across the street to reach their destination, and no one wants to take a detour, since they are on a schedule. They resolve to deal with the sniper.
Player cranks on all of his combat power goodies. He knows he's as ready as he's going to get. He sneaks into a position, and he and the sniper spot each other at the same moment. They shoot at each other, with Player 1 just barely firing first, and hits the sniper pretty darn well. It's a mortal wound, as a matter of fact, but the player doesn't know that. All he knows is that he's been hit, too. It wasn't the world's best shot, but it hits him hard enough. Player soaks up some of this damage, but he's wounded.
The sniper falls from view. And this is where things get pretty interesting. A few moments later, the sniper's spotter appears, and starts to draw a bead on Player. The Player makes an assumption; "I can soak up his damage if hits me, these guys aren't that good of a shot." He doesn't say this aloud, but that's what he's thinking.
So the Player stands up and charges the enemy position. As he runs, the first sniper reappears; he's not dead after all, but is very hurt. The Player presumes the sniper isn't as much of a threat as the sniper's uninjured spotter, and so the Player, on the run, shoots it out with the spotter. A round or two later, he's killed the spotter.
The Death
This is when the bloodied and dying sniper takes his final shot. He hits the Player really, really well. Also, he's charged up his nasty gun all the way, and so his base damage is also going to be much higher. Everything is rolled out, and the Player is, by the rules, dead before he hits the ground. He died, primarily, because the player made an assumption about the enemy, and, with the player's knowledge of the combat rules, thought the level of risk was lower than it truly was. He took it well enough.
The rest of the party argued for the chance to save him.
As written, the PC had been killed instantly. It's actually pretty hard to do this; a "mortal wound" occurs when half of a character's health is taken out in a single hit, and most characters expire within a dozen rounds or so. Most of the time, no one dies *right away.* There are ways to instantly heal an injured character. One of the remaining PCs had this ability, and he wanted the chance to use it.
Moment of truth
So I broke the rules (which I had written!) and gave the group 1 round to try. I knew the odds were pretty darn slim that they'd pull it off, but, mechanically, it was possible. The healer tried and got surprisingly close to succeeding, but too much damage had been done. Two other PCs spend a bunch of development points to instantly learn how the power to heal (such instant, dynamic unlocking of power is allowed for in the game), a pretty heavy investment on their part... but these two failed their last ditch, slim-chance attempts. With everyone out of actions, the round was up, and the PC was finally declared dead in the game.
"Golden Rule," blah-blah-blah
Now, all sorts of games, mine included, make noises about ignoring rules that you don't like, or in situations where the game/story will be better off for it. I'm a real stickler, though. I like the framework of rock-solid rules in a Simulationist game. I think that, ultimately, using this kind of treatment makes for *more* heroic games. If a Player knows that there's real risk in a given situation, and does it anyway, I think their success means more, since negative consequences for failure will be applied, instead of swept under the rug.
Still, I found my own reaction to the session to be surprising. Really, I wanted the group to accept the PC death. He had, after all, done a pretty foolish thing, tactically speaking. Sure, he didn't know that the sniper was still alive, and still in enough of a fighting shape to be a danger... but that's combat for you. I wanted the players to have to face the brutality of the moment - that their friend was dead, had died in front of their eyes, and there was nothing they could do about it. But the players weren't satisfied with that outcome. They wanted the chance, however slim, to reverse the death. And that meant a renegotiation of the rules.
I'm still not sure how I feel about it, and I'm certainly not sure how I'd feel if the character had somehow lived (with a new player expectation that maybe, just maybe, all future PC deaths would now be negotiable?).
What do you all think about all of this?
-adam
droog:
I suppose the question is why you wouldn't negotiate all other deaths according to this precedent. I've found that it puts you in a delicate position. I ran a game of RuneQuest for years that had similar issues; ie why did that chr get a break and not that one? At times it was only me that knew any bias was happening.
In my last efforts in that direction (Pendragon), I went ruthlessly with the rules and dice to stave off the issue. It worked for me.
Arturo G.:
My impression is that you should talk with your friends about the kind of game they want to play. Perhaps they are more interested in a less simulationist game, where PC are having some plot protection. Perhaps not, but they need to accept the full consequences of the kind of game they are playing. This is probably the best moment to talk with them, as they have experiment the consequences of the system up and front.
dindenver:
Adam,
Usually, on the Forge, Simulationist has a very strict meaning. It means you are doing Genre exploration. A great example of a Simulationist game would be James Bond. This simulates the movies/books almost flawlessly. Is this how you are using the term here? And if so, what genre are you simulating?
That question aside, there is a lot of meta-feeds that go into the impact of character death. Such as:
1) How hard is it to make a character that will fit with the existing group?
2) How long in real world time does it take to make a character. And this is a varialbe, not a set amount of time. Almost every cut throat GM says it only takes 15 minutes to make a character, but I find it usually takes me 30-60 mins to make one. The reason this feeds into the impact is, the player is effectively not playing this whole time. And if char gen requires medium to heavy input from the GM, that means that chargen time is doubled as the GM will be running the game for the rest of the players while the dead guy has to steal snippets of time in between scenes
3) How hard is it to integrate said compatible character into the new group? I mean this sounds like some sort of sci fi dystopia. And the group is in the middle of a VERY hazardous area. What is the "realistic" chances that a lone character is going to wonder up to the group, survive the encoutner, and then be trusted enough to be invited into the group? And even if he is, what is his share of the loot? I mean, he wasn't there from the beginning and will the guy that hired the group want to pay a total stranger that they didn't hire? That's a trick question, there is no "good" answer. If you give them full pay, its not realistic (which was the so-called justification for killing the other character in the first place) and if you don't you are boning the player even further.
4) How meaningful was the death? I mean the character was killed by someone they didn't know that didn't have a beef with them at all. If they had won,it would have only been an exercise in making the characters spend some resources before the final encounter of the mission and instead they lost a character to a random encoutner. There is not fun there, no heroism. You know, if a player gets to die for a cause, that's meaningful. But to die to a random encounter, that's just poor planning by the GM, no?
5) How much did the players like that character? I mean if you are a decent role player, you will never make that exact character again, right? So, they are gone from this world...
6) How much do the characters need that character? I mean, if he was filling a niche, then that niche is open until the other character joins the party. Also, if he was filling a niche, how much flexibility does the character really ahve in making a new character? I thinhk it is situations like this that create the Bob II-type characters, personally.
As you may have guessed, I am a bit of a Care Bear. And that's alright, I am usually upfront and honest about it with the groups I play with and we work it out.
The point is, there is no right or wrong answer here. You need to work that out with your group and figure out if you are playing gritty, cinematic or what? And establish instant death, "resurrection", pvp and other expectations ahead of time, right? Because trying to negotiate it after you rolled a crit is bad juju.
Also, is there a reason you were so deceptive with the player. Having them fall down, but not be out of the fight seems like an intentional move to take the character out. And I wonder if you were playing this Random Encounter too heavily handed. I mean, would there have been a real reward if the group had overcome these guys?
I don't know your game well enough to know if it is supposed to be played this aggressively or not. So maybe my comments are out of context. I apologize if they are. But if its standard RPG fare and not a specilized game that is more tactical and less roleplay, you definitely played this encounter over the top in my opinion.
Good luck with your new design man!
Ron Edwards:
Hiya,
Dave: whoa, that "genre emulation" comment is off-base. I outline a bunch of different historical applications of Simulationist play in the Right to Dream essay, and that's just one of them. In the later discussions of the "constructive denial" issue, using specific genres is only one way to arrive at the 'sacred cow' material of play. Adam is perfectly on target with his use of the term.
Adam, here's my thinking - what you're talking about exists, in Big Model terms, at the interface of the Social Contract and the Exploration/SIS levels. The specific components of the interface are (Social Contract: "let's play this game") and (SIS: "this is a character of some importance") - which, to articulate the precise point of interface, gets articulated as "as long as this character is alive, I can play."
So the issue becomes, "if my character dies, I have to stop playing." That's the issue over-and-above how a character may die.
If that actually had not been the case (and there are actually many ways for it not to be the case, for which the "make a new guy real real quick" is a fairly crude example), then the character's death could have been a wonderful and powerful and above-all confirmatory way to enjoy your game system and the scenario in general.
It seems to me that as long as that issue persists, then no tweak of the system itself will be satisfying - the only solution, as you discovered, is to diddle with the localized version of the Big Model at such a profound level that the entire fabric of play "feels ripped."
I've discussed the possible solutions at length in a variety of threads over the years, most recently in an Adept Press thread (I'll hunt the link in a minute), but I'm not sure if that's what you want to do with this thread. Thinking about Factions, based on my understanding and on your current description of it, it seems clear to me that character death through such events as you describe should be part of play, and understood as part of play. For what it's worth, your description of the character's death based on three different characters' actions and rolls was quite gripping. In which case, "how do I keep playing" when such things happen becomes a key question.
If the answer to that question is itself fun, then character death might become as much a celebration of your rules (and the events of a given situation) as character survival.
Do you want to pursue this line of thought?
Best, Ron
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